Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm

Imagine that back in the days when what was good for GM was good for the country, an advisory committee of economists had recommended to the President of the United States that the federal government should support the efforts of volunteer communities to design and build cars, either for sale or for free distribution to automobile drivers. The committee members would probably have been locked up in a psychiatric ward—if Senator McCarthy or the House Un-American Activities Committee did not get them first. Yet, in September 2000, something like this actually happened. The President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee recommended that the federal government support open source software as a strategic national choice to sustain the U.S. lead in critical software development.1 At the heart of the economic engine of the world’s most advanced economies, and in particular that of the United States, we are beginning to take notice of a hardy, persistent, and quite amazing phenomenon. A new model of production has taken root, one that should not be there, at least according to our most widely held beliefs about economic behavior. The intuitions of the late twentieth-century American resist the idea that thousands of volunteers could collaborate on a complex economic project. It certainly should not be that these volunteers will beat the largest and bestfinanced business enterprises in the world at their own game. And yet, this is precisely what is happening in the software industry.